Family Development Cycle
Recently in domestic and foreign psychology, more attention is paid to the research of the family. We study her various characteristics and the processes taking place in her, such as marriage satisfaction, family structure, power distribution, child-parent relations, etc. But in specific works it is often mentioned and rarely takes into account that the family is a dynamic entity,during the existence of which qualitatively different periods are distinguished.
This article is a survey of studies devoted to the family development cycle 2 and published in recent decades in the foreign scientific press.
Periodicity of changes occurring in the family, depending on the length of marriage, served as the basis for introducing the concept of the family development cycle into family research. This term was used for the first time in 1948 by E. Duvall and R. Heal at the National American Conference on Family Life, where they reported on the dynamics of family interaction. In constructing their periodization cycle, these authors relied on the ideas of E. Erikson and other specialists in the psychology of personality, who proposed to consider as a basis for periodization a set of tasks specific for each period of development.
The main feature of the delineation of the stages proposed by Duvall was the fact of the presence or absence of children in the family and their age, since it was believed that the main function of the family was procreation and parenting. On the basis of this characteristic, the following stages of the family cycle were identified: I - an emerging family, spouses married less than five years, no children;II - a childbearing family, the age of the older child under 2 years 11 months;III - a family with preschool children, an older child of 3 to 5 years 11 months;IV - family with children schoolchildren, older child from 6 to 12 years 11 months;V - family with children of adolescents, older than 13 years to 20 years 11 months;VI - the family that "sends" children to life( the stage lasts from the moment when the parent's home left the first child, until the moment when the family left the last child);VII - spouses of adulthood( from the moment when there is not a single child left in the family, until the end of work, until retirement);VIII - an aging family, from the moment of the spouses' retirement to the death of one of them.
This periodization has some disadvantages: unwieldiness, inattention to such characteristics as the length of marriage, the age of the spouses, the marriage cohort, which served as the basis for its fair criticism and for the creation of its new options. In subsequent years, a large number of different periodizations of the family cycle appeared-psychological, sociological, demographic, etc. The basis for them served as various theoretical considerations, and the results of empirical research and advisory practice. In our country the most famous was the periodization of E. K. Vasilieva. She distinguishes five stages of the cycle: I - the birth of a family, from the time of marriage until the birth of the first child;II - the birth and education of children, this stage ends with the beginning of the labor activity of at least one child;III - the end of the performance of somes educational function, this is the period from the beginning of the first child's labor activity until the moment when there is no child left in the care of the parents; IV - children live with their parents and at least one of them does not have a family of their own;V - spouses live alone or with children who have their own families. This periodization is in principle similar to Duvall's graduation, although the author tries to introduce into it also signs such as the presence of a family in children, the beginning of a child's labor activity, living with his parents. But since the destiny of each child is far from unambiguous - one leaves at a young age in another city and lives separately, and the other lives with his parents all his life, a gradation, although permissible for the purposes of the study conducted by E.K.Vasilieva( comparison of urban and rural families), but is not acceptable for psychological study of the family, as it turns out that different families live in a different number of stages.
In principle, there are a lot of signs that can be taken into account when distinguishing the stages of a family development cycle. Depending on the specific focus of the research, national and demographic characteristics of the sample, a variety of indicators can be used to identify the stages. But the use of different indicators in different works leads to a change in the boundaries of the stages. This amorphous concept makes it sufficiently vulnerable both empirically and theoretically.
For a long time, the stages proposed by E. Duvall were universally recognized, and in most papers devoted to the problem of the family development cycle or taking into account this parameter, this periodization was used. But recently this approach in connection with the above reasons has been subjected to serious criticism, supported by empirical facts. So, in the work of Gr. Spaniard, R. Saier, and R. Laceler, it was shown that the use of E. Duvall's scheme leads to the fact that the stages largely overlap each other, that is, spouses of the same age, length of service, material well-being, and m
A number of empirical studies have demonstrated that the concept of the stage of the family cycle itself has little prognostic value. Thus, in the work of Art. Noka used three types of dependent variables to determine the various personal and intrafamily characteristics of an individual at different stages of his life: the stages of the family cycle, the absence or presence of children in the family living with parents at the time of the study, and the length of marriage. The greatest number of statistically significant links was obtained between various personal, intrafamily and social characteristics and the fact of the absence or presence of children living together with their parents. Somewhat less, but also quite a large number of dependencies were obtained between the experience of marriage and other characteristics. The smallest number and the least interesting connections in terms of content were obtained between the stages of the family cycle and other variables. In the study already mentioned, Spaniier, Sayer and Laceler, based on the US population census, the predictive and empirical value of three variables was compared: the age of spouses, the length of marriage and the stage of the family cycle. It also turned out that the latter characteristic is the least significant in the empirical plan in comparison with the other two.
The above and a number of other works served as the basis for the multidimensional concept of the "stage of development of the family" to be replaced with such simple as the length of marriage and the presence or absence of children in the family living with their parents.
But other ways of searching for variables that determine the periodization of the family development cycle are possible. During the time of the family's existence, the nature of the spouses' activities is changing. An attempt to examine the life of the family from this point of view was carried out by X. and M. Feldman, who proposed the notion of "family career".By this they mean the totality of the individual's roles aimed at realizing themselves in any of the important spheres of life, such as leisure, work, and family. They identified two types of careers - intrafamily and extrafamily. Among the first were four types of careers, which received the following titles: career of sexual experience, career of marriage, parental career and career of relations between parents and adult children. They are characterized by the following features:
1) basically, for their implementation, a pair interaction is necessary, i.e., both spouses participate in them;2) unlike extra-family careers - professional and leisure - the features of their realization by an individual are largely determined by the characteristics of their family;3) during the implementation of each of the quarries, the individual enters into close relationships both with people belonging to him to one age cohort, and with people belonging to other age cohorts;4) each career has its own characteristics, timing and development trends. Each person can realize simultaneously both all four careers, and not one.
Introduction of this concept allowed X. and M. Feldman to propose a new approach to the study of the family development cycle, based on two research strategies: 1) consideration of family careers as independent and dependent variables;2) analysis of the situations of mutual intersection of the quarry, interference of one in the course of the other( for example, the influence on the marital relations of the appearance of the child, i.e., the intersection of the marital career and parental).Proceeding from this, periodization should be carried out first of all, taking into account the change of family careers realized by the individual, or the emergence of new ones.
Thus, the problem of periodization and the description of the family cycle remains far from being solved. Recent work has replaced the multi-valued concept of "stage" concepts such as the length of marriage, the age of the spouses, the presence or absence of children in the family, the "family career", etc., which greatly simplified the procedure for empirical research. It should be noted at once that, although the development of this problem began abroad about 40 years ago, there are no models of the family development cycle that sufficiently cover the changes, although studies show that the importance of this topic is both practical and theoreticalsense is beyond doubt. To explain this situation, there are a number of reasons: 1) difficulties in conducting and organizing research on the family cycle;2) the multifaceted nature of the changes;3) difficulties associated with the allocation of the stages of the cycle themselves;4) the complexity of interpreting the data, since most of the studies are done by the cutoff method, whereas the more adequate for studying the family development cycle would be the longitudinal study method( otherwise it is impossible to get rid of problems such as comparing respondents belonging to different marital cohorts,social factors affecting respondents of different generations, etc.);5) the problems associated with finding respondents who are at the last stages of the family development cycle, since the number of families due to divorce and death decreases with each stage, and finally, 6) the theoretical problems facing the modern psychology of the family.
Perhaps, it is with these reasons that the fact is connected that there is practically no psychological research of family development in our country. In this regard, in the future, appealing to specific works, we will have to rely on foreign authors.
Unfortunately, today it is difficult to offer a complete description of the changes occurring during the family development cycle, the data obtained are too scattered, they concern the most diverse aspects of family life, are often contradictory or incomparable, because they were obtained with the help of different methods and different schemes for periodization of the cycle. But it is obvious that they are multifaceted. Here are just a few examples.
In the work of D. Orsner, devoted to changes in the style of rest of spouses during the family cycle, three possible types of spending free time were singled out: joint rest, when both spouses are engaged in the same, together;parallel rest, when both spouses are engaged in the same, but separately from each other;and individual rest, when everyone is engaged in his own business. Then the author tried to determine the relationship between the nature of spending free time and satisfaction with marriage in married couples with different experiences of living together. The fact of joint free time was associated with the satisfaction of marriage with the duration of marriage from 0 to 5 years, mainly in men and with a marriage experience of 18 to 23 years, mainly for women. For
couples with such a marriage experience, some increase in the parallel free time was also characteristic, while in couples with a joint life of 5 to 18 years, both spouses, although in general men are somewhat more than women, prefer to have a rest individually.
The goal of the study of J. Mädling and M. McKeri was to determine the relationship between the satisfaction of marriage and the similarity of values in spouses with different experiences of living together. They identified three groups of respondents: I - spouses with a marriage experience of 1 to 12 years;II - from 13 to 25 years and III - 26-50 years. The data obtained by them show that the similarity of values according to the Rokich test is positively associated with the satisfaction of marriage with only the third group of respondents.
L. Tamire and K. Antonouzzi made an attempt to see how people's perceptions of themselves, motivation and social ties vary among married people of different ages. The analysis of the obtained data allows us to state that the parents of adult children are the most confident in themselves and in their ability to control their own lives. The most controversial group in terms of perceiving themselves turned out to be parents of teenage children. In the study of motivation, it was found that in the group of parents of adult children, the need for affiliacy is significantly developed for men, and for women - the need for achievements. It also turned out that the lesser length of marriage is associated with a large number of social ties, but at the same time, unlike respondents with long experience, with less satisfaction with them.
Similar examples could be continued, but it is unlikely that such mosaic studies will be able to recreate a complete picture of the changes occurring during the family cycle. Suffice it to say that to date there are data on the changes occurring in the interpersonal perception of the spouses, in their communication with each other, in the distribution of roles, in the characteristics of sexual relationships, etc. But, in spite of the general disparity of the data,who "got lucky" more. And first of all it is a change in the satisfaction with marriage.
The scientists' interest in this problem is huge. Lewis and Spaniere in the survey of surveys of satisfaction with marriage for a decade, it is this topic identified as one of the most studied. We can distinguish two groups of studies that hold different points of view about the nature of changes in satisfaction with marriage with an increase in the length of the married couple's living together. The representatives of both groups agree that after some time after the marriage, and more often after the birth of the first child, the satisfaction with marriage of both spouses begins to decrease, the main differences are related to the question of what happens to it in the future.
A number of earlier studies of family issues conducted by R. Blade, D. Wulf, B. Paris, E. Lucky, shows that with the increase in the length of marriage, the satisfaction of the spouses is increasingly falling. But there is another point of view, based on a number of later works performed by such authors as H. Feldman, Gr. Spanier, C. Cannon, B. Rollins. The data obtained in them serve as the basis for the assertion that the dependence of the satisfaction with marriage on the length of marriage is U-shaped, that is, the decrease in satisfaction at the middle stages of the family cycle is gradually stopped, and then, in spouses with an 18-20 years or more, there is even a slight increase. True, in one of the largest studies devoted to this problem, conducted by Gr. Spaniier, R. Levis, C. Kohl in three different samples( three US states), conflicting data were obtained: the results of one of them testify to the U-shaped nature of the dependence, the examination of the other in favor of a permanent decline in satisfaction with marriage, the data obtainedon the third, do not give grounds for unambiguous interpretation. On the basis of the results, these authors also severely criticized the data of other works, insisting that an increase in satisfaction with marriage at later stages of the family development cycle can only be an artifact of research, that is, it can be caused by some other factors rather than by other factorschanges in satisfaction.
On the other hand, as some mathematical calculations show, the U-shaped dependence itself is rather complicated, and the various technical problems associated with calculating the data obtained in specific empirical studies can lead to the fact that the U-shape will be smoothed in favor ofrectilinear.dependence.
An attempt to approach this problem from a slightly different angle was made by R. Guilford and V. Bengston. Based on theoretical developments suggesting that satisfaction with marriage is the resultant indicator of two variables-positive and negative-they tried to track the changes for each of them separately in three groups of spouses. The first group included spouses with an average length of married life - 3 years, most of whom have no children, the average length of marriage in the other group is 21 years, in the senior group the average length of married couples was 41 years. The measurement of positive and negative interaction in the spouses in these groups showed that the changes in the positive component are U-shaped, that is, the positive component reaches a maximum in the first group, in the spouses of the second group it sharply decreases, in the third - there is again a slight increase. In contrast to the positive, the magnitude of the negative interaction between spouses increases gradually with the increase in the length of marriage, from the first stage to the third. It follows that the satisfaction curve, depending on the length of the marriage, is U-shaped, although in the first and third groups the overall satisfaction is high, but for various reasons: at the first stage of marriage, the number of positive interactions is significantly higher than the negative, although the number of the latter alsolarge, at the last stage of positive interactions less, but the number of negative ones decreased significantly. These changes were also considered depending on the age of the spouses and a number of other characteristics of the family. Similar dependencies were obtained, but no differences were found between the results of men and women.
In one of the last works devoted to changes in satisfaction, depending on the length of marriage performed by Art. Anderson, S. Roussel and V. Shumn, an attempt was made to carefully calculate the obtained data based on the latest achievements of computer technology. In addition, in order to test how much social desirability( the desire to comply with socially approved norms) can influence the increase in the level of satisfaction, these authors used a special test in their work. Their data, obtained on the basis of a survey of 200 couples who are at 5 different stages of the family cycle, confirm the U-shaped character of the dependence, and taking into account the changes in social desirability allows us to state that its influence on the increase in the level of satisfaction with marriage at later stages is very insignificant.
The data of the last two works, as well as some others, somewhat outweigh the "scales" in favor of the fact that the dependence of satisfaction with marriage on the length of marriage is U-shaped. But the statement about the presence of changes in the family development cycle, and even the description of their nature, do not say anything about their causes, which is in fact the most important issue, especially in connection with the need for practical use of the data obtained in empirical studies. After all, only knowing this answer, you can try to influence the changes in a directed way, trying to smooth out their possible negative consequences in a particular work with families with different periods of marriage.
Unfortunately, most of the works attempting to answer the question of what is behind the changes are theoretical and insufficiently confirmed by empirical facts.
Gr. Spaniier, R. Lewis and C. Kohl, on the study of which we have already mentioned above, to explain the increase in marital satisfaction in the spouses at the last stages of the family development cycle, the following considerations are advanced:
1) the cause of this may be the so-called "cohort effect"", Which is expressed in the fact that the later stage of marriage is subjected to research, the greater the chances that the spouses, unsatisfied with the marriage, have already managed to divorce the
, the remaining spouses who are satisfied with the marriage and provide the U-shaped characterthi;
2) another reason is the age of the respondents;it can be assumed that there are some age-related changes that ensure that the spouses perceive their marriage at later stages of the cycle as successful;3) there are data that with age people tend to be more in line with socially-encouraged norms, that is, they are more susceptible to mechanisms of social desirability, tend to remain silent about their problems. Perhaps, it is in connection with this attitude that they answer the test questions in such a way that as a result, their satisfaction is higher( the data obtained in the study of St. Anderson, S. Roussel and V. Shumn, described above, in a senseallow to reject this assumption);4) another possible explanation is related to the effect of the mechanism of cognitive dissonance. The fact that spouses are married for many years can lead them eventually to the conviction that their marriage, in spite of everything, is not so bad. Especially prone to this should be middle-aged couple, because with age, divorce becomes more difficult psychologically. According to R.Shram, such an increase in marital satisfaction at later stages of the family cycle can also be associated with such factors as: 1) the more active participation of women in labor activity, after children become old enough, leads to a decrease fortheir importance to family problems;2) more opportunities for self-expression arise in parents after children grow up, because the situation of raising children imposes rather rigid role requirements, primarily related to the observance of a certain sexual role - mother or father.
A large number of studies conducted mainly in the United States focused on the problem of how children influence the relationships of spouses. Especially a lot of work was aimed at identifying those changes that occur in interpersonal relations between husband and wife in connection with the appearance of the first child. The results obtained here regarding the satisfaction with marriage are quite contradictory. The data of a number of studies indicate that the satisfaction of the marriage of young parents in comparison with the control group of couples who did not have a child during the study was dramatically reduced. In other works, on the contrary, it was found that the spouses who became parents noted an increase in satisfaction with their family life and relationships with the partner. Nevertheless, all studies carried out on this subject note that after the birth of a child the couple is experiencing a crisis( its magnitude varies among different authors).It is connected with the acquisition by the couple of a new role and a change in the already established relationship in a pair. This crisis is harder for women than for men, negative, the effect of this crisis as a whole increases with the age of respondents. The birth of a child causes a shift in the relations of the spouses towards more traditional ones, that is, the so-called sex-role differentiation in the relations of partners is strengthened.
A large group of works was devoted to revealing how the withdrawal of children from the family affects the satisfaction with marriage. There is a widespread opinion that the beginning of the independent life of children is painful for parents( they lose what their lives were filled with for many years).This situation even received a special name in English, the "syndrome of empty nests."A number of works have been devoted to the study of this phenomenon, including the investigation of N. Glen. As a research material, he used six national American surveys. Comparing the answers of women of the same age living at the time of the survey with children who have not yet reached the age of independence, with the answers of those whose children grew up, became completely independent and separated from their parents, indicates that the latter are more satisfied with life as a whole, andalso consider themselves happier in marriage than the first. In a study later conducted by N. Glen and S. McLanakhan, these data were confirmed and supplemented. Comparing families as a whole with children and families without children, these authors concluded that there is a negative relationship between the presence of children in the family and the satisfaction with marriage, particularly in families where women work, where the couple is an adherent of non-Catholic faith, and also in familiespeople who have a higher educational level. Comparison of spouses living with children and spouses without children in the studies mentioned above. Noca, Art. Anderson, S. Roussel and V. Shumn also testifies that the latter consider themselves happier in marriage than the first.
Based on these studies, the presence of children in the family began to be associated with a decrease in the level of satisfaction with marriage. But how do children exert such influence on marriage, are they an indirect cause of a decline in marriage satisfaction, or is their presence in the family directly affecting the relationship between spouses? Can it be argued that children are the cause of most other changes that occur during the family development cycle? It is difficult to answer these questions, based on the studies carried out.
To explain the impact that children have on the family, you can put forward a number of hypotheses. First of all, the analysis of the parental role itself proves that it is extremely complicated. Speaking of her, Rossi put forward the reasons why this role differs from other social roles: 1) social stereotypes that exist in society exert pressure on a woman both in terms of birth and care of the child;2) the birth of a child does not always happen in a situation where the spouses want it;3) this role is accepted once and for all, it is difficult to refuse from it;4) the preparation for this role, the importance of it and the responsibility associated with it, do not correspond to each other - there is no special training, there are no guides on which you can become a good parent, the transition to the role is performed quite suddenly, etc. Indirect proof of the existenceSpecial problems associated with the role of the parent are the data of J. Robertson, which show that 80% of women think that being a grandmother is much more pleasant than being a mother. These women - grandmothers themselves - say that in this role they experience all the pleasures that they experienced as mothers, while in this role there is no such burden of responsibility and those experiences that mothers experience.
Naturally, the parental role, in addition to a lot of positive experiences, gives parents a lot of trouble. But what else is changing in the family when a child appears in it? If we turn to the above studies of changes in the satisfaction with marriage after the appearance of the child, it is noteworthy first of all that the spouses after his birth begin to complain about the deterioration in the quality of interpersonal communication in the family, especially women say much about it, for example, in the studies of EDyer and H. Feldman. Interesting data in this connection were obtained in the work of B. Miller. Among other variables, he studied the interrelation of such factors as satisfaction with marriage, the feeling of camaraderie and the number of children. It turned out that, in itself, the level of satisfaction with marriage is not related to the number of children currently living with parents, but it is closely related to the feeling of camaraderie among the spouses, which in turn closely correlates with the number of children. It follows that the presence of children in the home affects the frequency of interpersonal interaction between spouses - it becomes less frequent, because it is complicated by various responsibilities associated with children, which in turn affects the satisfaction with marriage. Data on the dependence of the feeling of partnership in marriage on the length of marriage obtained in the same study show that the lowest level of partnership falls just at the time when the house is at the same time the largest number of children - the period when the first childwent to school. On the basis of this, B. Miller concluded that the child has a serious influence on the interpersonal communication system of spouses, although the spouses' desire to have children, their preparedness for this, etc. are also highly differentiating factors.
Comparison of couples living andnot living with children, conducted in the study mentioned above. Anderson, S. Roussel and V. Shumn, characterizes the first as families where inter-personal discussions occur between spouses much less often than in second ones, which also allows us to say that a decrease in marriage satisfaction is associated with a decrease in the opportunities for interpersonal communication between spouses because ofthe need to devote more time to children.
The period of realization by the family of the educational function is also a time of serious professional growth and achievements in the sphere of career, in other words, the professional role constantly competes with the parental role of the individual. Thus, the American population census conducted in the 1960s, presented in P. Glick's work, the peak of income, and therefore the peak of professional career, is reached by middle-aged men aged 45-54, and men of lower class in40 years. But most often this is the age when the oldest child in the family is still a teenager and lives with his parents. These data suggest that the child may be a kind of competitor to professional activities, especially if the mother in the family also works.
The appearance of the child adds another social role to the roles that the person already has to perform, perhaps in Mead's terminology, the situation of "role stress" arises. If we go back to the Feldman argument, which was mentioned above, it turns out that with the birth of a child, a person begins to function actively in all four "family careers".In addition, the birth of a child means the restructuring of other family roles, too.
In this sense, the considerations that were expressed about the normal cycle of family development by a well-known family psychotherapist A. Barkai are interesting. From his point of view, children in the family largely reflect the effectiveness of the social functioning of the family. Their academic performance and behavior, and then the successes of their careers, characterize how effectively the family "worked" on them. With the arrival of the child in the kindergarten, and even more so in the school for parents begins a kind of verification period. A particularly difficult period occurs when a child enters adolescence, and his own "I" begins to form actively, he is at the time a "harbinger" of another world in his own family and the combination of his youth world with the world of parents is a serious problem, especially since a number of other factors are superimposed here. One of them is the professional activity of the spouses, and the other, no less important, is the parents of the spouses. After all, it is during this period that their parents begin to be particularly concerned about the problems associated with aging. They need help and support from the children. Spouses in this period are as if between two fires - on the one hand, growing up children, on the other hand, aging parents. And this contradiction imposes yet another imprint on the satisfaction with marriage at this stage of the family cycle.
There is one more explanation why the presence of children in the family adversely affects the satisfaction with marriage. So, Glen and McLanahan believe that the child is a knot that connects those families that would have disintegrated without children. Despite the dissatisfaction with each other, the couple stay together to raise children together, although it is due to such families that a decrease in the satisfaction with marriage during a certain period of the family development cycle results. After the children have grown up, such spouses either diverge, or so adapt to each other that they begin to believe that they are not so bad with each other. As a result, satisfaction with marriage increases with the increase in the length of service.
It is interesting that most authors do not focus attention, but they often imply that the spouses' satisfaction with marriage is primarily influenced by the age in which their child is currently at the moment( B. Miller, E. Duvall, etc.).So, if an infant can hypothetically lead only to the rallying of the family - both parents should actively take care of it in accordance with their conjugal roles, then the older child is already an independent person who can directly influence the parents' relationships, promote their competition forcloser relations with themselves, oppose themselves to their parents, defend their independence, serve as an indicator of the effectiveness of their educational and social activities.(Barkay, R. Skinner, etc.).Especially eloquent about the influence of the child's age on the relationship of spouses is evidence of the spousal therapy.
There are similar empirical data. Thus, a survey of a large number of married couples with children, conducted by K. Pasley and V. Gekas, shows that the most difficult period for parents is the time when the child is a teenager. Here the problems of children's control and autonomy are especially acute for the spouses.
Children are far from being the only factor that is promoted as a reason for changes in the relations of spouses and a decrease in the satisfaction with marriage. The period of 25-50 years is the time of the most active social and professional functioning of the individual, which in itself, as indicated by many authors, can lead to a cooling of his interest in the family, a more indifferent attitude to the spouse and to his family duties, and, consequently, todecreased satisfaction with marriage. It is difficult for a person to actively manifest himself simultaneously in different spheres, his preferences in the sphere of life values change. With age( it can be assumed that this time coincides only coincidentally with the period when children leave the parental home), close interpersonal connections become more significant, the approach of old age gives rise to the fear of loneliness, a person begins to orient more towards his spouse, and consequently, the satisfaction with marriage increases. So, according to some information, people after 60 years often consider their marriage as satisfying to them as in the first years after its conclusion. Marriage as a whole has a significant positive effect on the psychological condition of aging people. And both men and women at this age are more focused on contacts with close people and family.
There are also a number of alternative explanations for the change in the marriage satisfaction curve and the parameters of marital relations, for example, involving research on life cycles, age crises, the impact of society on people with children, etc. But such hypotheses are less common inliterature, they are less developed. Moreover, it is difficult to agree that the changes occurring during the family development cycle are related to the impact of one particular factor, it seems that one can speak of a complex interconnection of various causes. In addition, neither children nor work obviously do not influence the mutual relations of the spouses on their own, but only contribute to the fact that the spouses begin to pay attention to those aspects of the relationship, which previously seemed unimportant. Of course, in a short review it is not possible to describe in detail the results obtained in the field of research on the family development cycle, one can only outline the main directions in which development is being carried out in line with this problem: the study of the dynamics of satisfaction with marriage according to length of service, the influence of children on the relationship of spouses, changesvarious characteristics of the family during the cycle of its development, etc., as well as the difficulties and tasks that confront them. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that many different studies have been carried out on this subject, a wealth of empirical material has been accumulated, the theoretical interpretation of which largely belongs to the future.
But the work done is not without a number of serious shortcomings, the overcoming of which, from our point of view, could contribute to a more successful development of this problem. Among them, first of all, I would like to call the absence of a comprehensive approach to the reality under study. Most of the works operate with only two or three variables, fixing, thus, the changes that occur, but not being able to judge their causes and depth. Not enough attention is paid to the differences that are observed in the responses of men and women, and in fact an analysis of the specifics of their positions in the family at different stages of the family cycle would make it possible to more accurately judge the influence of factors such as children and careers. In addition, most authors clearly do not take into account the fact that all the answers received by respondents are not a description of objective reality, but rather phenomena of the spouses' perception of the characteristics of their family life. There are a number of other methodological shortcomings, the analysis of which would help understand the changes occurring during the family development cycle, which, of course, does not reduce the value of the results already obtained. All of the above indicates the importance and relevance of studying the family cycle, both for the purpose of creating a full-fledged theory of family functioning, and for practical work in this field - counseling, educational activities, preparing young people for marriage, etc.